I have recently acquired a new LP by John Coltrane - an absolutely fabulous study in the cool, smouldering jazz of the golden era of jazz in the 1950's (1957 to be precise). The release I have is a 2016 re-issue on the Blue Note label - a sparkling 180gm…

So the latest version of Ubuntu isn't an earth-shattering release, full of never before seen new features, but there's one very small tweak that pleases me no end! It would seem that the maintainers of the Apt Package Management system, have decided to shorten the package name in it's use,…

Update - this no longer works in iOS 10 as Apple has finally implemented playing movies from iCloud. If you try this trick now you will end up renting the movie regardless of whether you have the physical space available or not I came across this great trick for saving…

I've been playing around with Textastic, a great text editor for iOS with syntax highlighting, ability to connect to remote servers to grab files for editing, and a host of editor-like functions. It's just been updated to provide support for the iPad Pro, and on this large tablet it feels…

I absolutely love Hexo - it does a great job of creating a basic blog with static pages written in Markdown, that can be deployed to any host and easily updated from a command line or any text editor capable of reading and writing markdown (so just about any text…

Sometimes it just makes sense to output a pivoted table, instead of purely columnar data, when running a T-SQL select query. It's easy to think of pivoting as a complex process when being implemented in code (as opposed to the visual environment of Excel for example), however it's actually quite…

I've owned a 12.9" iPad Pro since they came out and whilst I love the large screen estate (for some things) the on screen keyboard in use doesn't always hit the mark. I have looked at the Apple and Logitech offerings for hardware keyboards, designed as cases, and…

I came across a little gem the other week and use it all the time when I need to measure results over a period of weeks - this identifies the start of the current week so can be easily used in a variable, for example, as an 'end date' parameter in my query. It goes like this:-…